The UN human rights office, OHCHR, has urged restraint in Syria, amid reports that some individuals from the country’s Alawite community and other minority groups have been targeted and killed.

The UN and the Government of Lebanon unveiled a $371.4 million extension of the Lebanon Flash Appeal on Tuesday aiming to provide life-saving assistance to civilians affected by the recent conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis.

At least 5,601 people were killed in gang violence in Haiti last year, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday, appealing for greater efforts by the authorities and the international community to address the root causes.

A day after the United States reported its first human death from avian flu, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) insisted on Tuesday that the risk to the wider population remains “low”.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jan 06 (IPS) - In 2021, the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr became the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize.

BRATISLAVA, Jan 06 (IPS) - “A lot of people are very scared,” says Zalina Marshenkulova. “This is obviously another tool of repression. The state is waging war on the remnants of free-thinking people in Russia and trying to suppress all dissent and freedom,” the Russian feminist activist tells IPS.

NEW YORK, Jan 06 (IPS) - Trump, who wants an end to the Israeli-Hamas war even before he reassumes the Presidency, must know that denying the Palestinian right to statehood and conceding further Palestinian land to Israel is a recipe for the next horrific inferno that will overshadow even the present calamitous Israel-Hamas war.

“We saw dead bodies scattered to the left and right, decomposing in the sun”, recounts Jonathan Dumont, Head of Emergency Communications at the World Food Programme (WFP). A veteran of conflict zones around the world, he says that the destruction and suffering he witnessed in Gaza is on a “different scale”.

Communal violence remains the primary driver of conflict in South Sudan and continues to exact a heavy toll on civilians across the country, UN peacekeepers said on Monday.

Human suffering in Sudan has reached devastating levels, with over 11.5 million people internally displaced and 3.2 million seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.